Chapter 37
Yu Xingxing was indeed still a young man; the sadness on his face was clearly visible.
The originally high-spirited and enthusiastic atmosphere in the car suddenly cooled, and even his bright eyelashes drooped listlessly.
Shu Ci propped his chin on his hand, observing him for a while through the rearview mirror, seeming a little sympathetic.
At the next turning point, he pursed his lips and said, “You…”
Yu Xingxing’s eyes widened instantly, he sat up straight, and held his breath in anticipation.
Mr. Shu was talking to him!
“Are you very familiar with Lu Wan Qing?” Shu Ci hesitated for a moment before deciding to approach the topic from the angle of Lu Wan Qing.
In the original book, Yu Xingxing was a second-generation military officer, and his family was old friends with Gu Lan Zhu’s white moonlight’s family. They were the type who would naturally disdain associating with someone like Lu Wan Qing, who came from a humble background.
“C-counts one-sided familiarity?” Yu Xingxing’s eyes flickered, his voice playful, “He keeps a distance in the team. Besides Cui Shaojiang, I don’t think many people would dare say they’re very familiar with General Lu.”
Shu Ci nodded in agreement: “Considering your time spent together, he keeps more distance from me.”
They even had a physical safety distance to maintain.
Yu Xingxing pouted, full of disbelief: “You’re teasing me, right? During that operation, the moment the cruise system located your figure, General Lu rushed over in his personal vessel. I was eating dog food through the telescope the whole time.”
Shu Ci: …
So there’s this story behind it.
The details of the Dragon Thorn Island secret operation couldn’t be disclosed, and Yu Xingxing tried his best to refrain from asking Shu Ci about the reasons for General Lu’s disappearance from the camp for several days and his failure to return with them. The insider, Cui Shaojiang, would only smile enigmatically.
Shu Ci also sensed this from his words and quietly breathed a sigh of relief.
Fortunately, the fact that he spent his heat cycle on Dragon Thorn Island hadn’t been leaked out. Otherwise, if he were to shoot a promotional video at the base, he’d feel like he would be publicly humiliated everywhere he went.
“Seriously, I’ve almost never seen General Lu lose his composure.”
When Yu Xingxing talked about Lu Wan Qing, his eyes were full of admiration: “When I was little, my father was transferred to Yuan Yu District Seven. General Lu was just a little brother in my father’s service group back then. Every newcomer in the service group would make mistakes, but only he was mature beyond his years and never made a mistake.”
Shu Ci adjusted the backrest of his seat and enthusiastically changed his posture.
If he ignored the retaliatory actions Yu Xingxing took in the original book, this little guy’s speaking style was quite to his liking. He was willing to chat with him about Lu Wan Qing, and he was no longer sleepy.
“Ten years ago, Yuan Yu was still relatively chaotic. Some places were poorly managed truce zones. The power and responsibility relationships weren’t as clearly defined as in the Jinji District. There were many local bullies with their own private armories. The service group was somewhat similar to the personal secretary groups of various generals, needing to coordinate and communicate with various power centers in Yuan Yu while also staying close to their superiors and promptly communicating situations. A slight misstatement could trigger disputes, and some people might try to insert their own people into the service group.”
“My father handled…,” Yu Xingxing counted on his fingers, “about seven or eight members of the service group. But General Lu was the only one who never made a mistake from the time he joined to his promotion.”
Besides the many miscellaneous tasks, the service group also had to squeeze in time for their own training. If they failed the collective assessment, they would have to leave the service group. Lu Wan Qing was always the top scorer.
At that time, Yu Xingxing, due to his father’s relationship, could still call him Brother Lu in a clear voice. He stood upright in front of his father, with a calm expression, but he would seriously look at him and occasionally pull out a few snacks from his pocket for him.
“He really has something,” Shu Ci murmured.
From the conversation, he could roughly determine that Lu Wan Qing was in the Yuan Yu service group about ten years ago. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Lu Wan Qing was so dazzling in Yuan Yu, and he still had time to enroll in medical school and become an outstanding senior brother of Yi Xing Shui?
This time management skill was already superhuman, right?
“That’s right!” Yu Xingxing didn’t understand his implication but wholeheartedly agreed with Shu Ci’s statement. “He even received a first-class merit in the service group, single-handedly capturing several internal spies. My father and several of his uncles appreciated his talent, so they transferred him out of the service group and promoted him.”
The spy incident was arguably the deepest memory from Yu Xingxing’s distant time in Yuan Yu.
At that time, an internal spy infiltrated his home, trying to find military information that his father kept at home. Unexpectedly, he happened to encounter him skipping school and secretly playing games at home that day.
Yu Xingxing went to the kitchen to get a drink and ran into the spy ransacking the house.
How could a kid with barely any hair be an adult’s opponent?
Before he could release his pheromones to scare the person, he was immediately taken hostage. On one side was the pheromone suppression, and on the other was the hand gripping his neck, making him unable to breathe. He struggled and kicked his legs desperately, only to be restrained even more painfully.
Later, Yu Xingxing learned that he almost became the hostage in the negotiations between the spy and his father.
But at that moment, Lu Wan Qing knocked on the door.
—The school contacted his parents about him skipping school, and the busy General Yu had to send someone from the service group.
Lu Wan Qing sensed the abnormality inside the house from outside the door. He knocked on the door, but he entered through the bedroom window.
A feint, like a god descending from heaven, he instantly suppressed the spy.
Yu Xingxing almost thought he was going to die. He stood there dumbfounded until Lu Wan Qing carried him out of the mess. He didn’t scold him for skipping school, nor did he show any expression. He only rubbed his head with a large hand and whispered, “It’s okay.”
He was stunned, the fear overwhelming him.
So he hugged Lu Wan Qing’s legs and cried hard.
If it had been his father, he would have said, “What’s there to cry about, a dignified Alpha!” But Lu Wan Qing quietly waited for him to finish crying and sent him to his father’s side.
Later, he heard that Lu Wan Qing chased down other exposed spies in the freezing snow.
Later, Lu Wan Qing left the service group, his father was transferred again, and the whole family returned to City A. He never saw him again.
“I’m the only one in my conscription class who actively chose to go to Yuan Yu,” Yu Xingxing grinned, “General Lu is my idol. I want to follow him.”
His passionate voice seemed to still echo in the car, and the base gate was already nearby.
Shu Ci suddenly realized that he had been listening to Yu Xingxing’s stories with relish, like listening to a story, completely forgetting the specific location and route of the base. He also didn’t know if it was intentional.
“Brother Shu!” After Yu Xingxing shared his heart, even his address changed, “General Lu is actually waiting for you!”
Shu Ci followed his gaze and saw a man in a dark blue military uniform standing under the banyan tree at the entrance of the base.
Sunlight fell through the gaps in the leaves, dappling his neat uniform.
Another picturesque composition and color scheme.
Shu Ci’s heart skipped a beat, and he quietly took out his phone and took a picture through the car window.
Turning back, he saw Yu Xingxing smiling at him after parking the car.
“I understand, our General is a walking hormone!” Yu Xingxing kept clicking his tongue, “Hey, the scene where he carried the unconscious you into the cabin should have been filmed, what a divine couple!”
Shu Ci remained silent.
It turned out that Lu Wan Qing’s little fanboy was not only talkative but also a CP shipper.
He jumped out of the car and walked towards Lu Wan Qing.
Lu Wan Qing raised his hand and waved to Yu Xingxing. The young man immediately drooped his mouth, sulked, got into the car, and sped into the base.
“Bullying a kid?” Shu Ci crossed his arms, watching the golden license plate disappear from view, raising an eyebrow slightly, “He told me a lot about you on the way, saying that he decided to follow you since he enlisted, and you just sent him away?”
“It can’t be said that way.” Lu Wan Qing naturally took Shu Ci’s backpack from his shoulder, carried it for him, and walked into the base. “If he saw us meeting without hugging, kissing, or holding hands as we walked in, he would definitely have more to say.”
“…” Shu Ci twitched the corner of his mouth.
On the one hand, he thought Lu Wan Qing’s judgment was likely correct, on the other hand, he felt that Lu Wan Qing’s tone was like complaining about his son.
The two walked into the base side by side, a fist’s distance between them.
Neither of them spoke again, only the sound of their footsteps on the ground in unison.
After walking a long way, Shu Ci spoke slowly, his voice very low: “In the life you’ve lived and cannot change, you knew I would be at the Central Hotel that day, you knew I would divorce and be with Gu Lan Zhu, but did you know what Yu Xingxing would do?”
Lu Wan Qing stopped, turning his head: “I knew.”
“Tell me? Let’s see if what we know is the same.”
“He would steal… the clothes that person painstakingly custom-made and give them to the young master of the Bai family; he would publicly humiliate that person, letting everyone know that he was the Bai family’s young master’s substitute.”
Lu Wan Qing didn’t want to call that soulless, self-degrading person “Shu Ci,” only “that person.”
The Shu Ci he truly recognized was in front of him.
Shu Ci’s eyes flickered. That’s right, what Lu Wan Qing had experienced was similar to the plot he had seen.
The Bai family’s young master was Gu Lan Zhu’s white moonlight’s bamboo horse, the object of Yu Xingxing’s obsessive devotion.
“Then, what was your mood when you saved him?” Shu Ci’s voice was soft, as if it would disappear in the wind if he spoke.
Lu Wan Qing raised his head in surprise.
He didn’t expect that Yu Xingxing would tell Shu Ci even about his time in Yuan Yu.
“Shu Ci.” Lu Wan Qing clearly bit out his name, “From the day I joined the service group and followed General Yu, I knew what kind of person he might become, that he might walk a path of inescapable fate, that he might become someone who hurts others.”
Shu Ci stopped, meeting Lu Wan Qing’s gaze: “And then?”
When he recognized Yu Xingxing, he subconsciously avoided his gaze.
But when he saw Yu Xingxing’s dejected and hurt expression, he hesitated. The exchange during the car ride made Shu Ci even more confused. Should he judge a person based on the original plot?
The line between “characters in a book” and “living people” became increasingly blurred, and he could no longer maintain his calm, detached observation.
At this point, the young man hadn’t done anything yet.
Should Yu Xingxing, who hadn’t made any mistakes yet, be defined by his actions in the original book?
“There’s no ‘and then’,” Lu Wan Qing said, “Saving him was an unquestioning decision. I cared more about whether I could save every person who was in mortal danger before my eyes than whether he would hurt anyone in the future.”
Even if he still walked down the path of hurting others in the future, he would not regret saving him.
“That’s my principle. I only seek to live up to my conscience and the mission of the golden shield.”
The alpha’s eyes were firm, his tone calm and forceful, every word falling heavily on Shu Ci’s heart. The wind blew up the tassels on his shoulders, and the epaulets reflected the sunlight, emitting a faint golden light.
Shu Ci’s eyes flickered, and he clenched his hand at his side.
At this moment, he finally found a foothold for the value of the eighteen promotional video plans. The vague protagonist in his mind finally had flesh and blood, a concrete human form.
And the heart that had been floating uneasily since he came to this fictional world finally had a place to rest.
Author’s Note:
Yu Xingxing: Gossiping and eating melons about the official CP
It’s a two-way rush (breaking down! Very loud!)
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